What next for low-income countries?
In its latest forecast, Covax says it is in “ongoing dialogue with the Government of India” over COVID-19 vaccine supplies, and that “the timing and extent to which export controls in India” are released is a major cause of uncertainty. While the US government has also joined the push for India to resume exporting to Covax, the signs are not positive. A senior Indian government official was recently quoted saying that India will not resume sharing doses until all adults in the country are immunised.
Despite India making rapid progress on vaccination, with more than 780 million doses administered, only 196 million people have been double vaccinated. Full adult immunisation in India is aimed for by the end of 2021 – there are around 1 billion adults in the country.
Covax has made other requests to donors and manufacturers, notably for countries with high vaccine coverage that are ahead of Covax in manufacturer queues to give up their places, and for enhanced donations from countries with high proportions of people already vaccinated. These requests are not new, with the head of the WHO admitting he “may sound like a broken record” in making them.
Vaccine donation pledges to date have yet to make substantial inroads into actually getting people vaccinated. In June, the G7 countries pledged to donate 1 billion doses to “poor countries”, with the UK pledging 100 million of them. Yet so far, the UK has delivered only 5.1 million doses to Covax and sent just 10.3 million abroad in total.
At the same time, the UK has actually taken doses from Covax that it has a right to (many other wealthy countries have waived their right to their share). In June, the same month it made its 100-million-dose pledge, the UK received 539,000 doses from Covax, more than double the doses Covax sent to Africa in the same month.